Love the Work, Hate The Job: Why America’s best workers are more unhappy than ever – David Kusnet, 2008
It’s taken me a couple of months of procrastination and other things to get around to writing about David Kusnet’s latest book, but I wanted to recommend it to UK unionists as well as those in the US who’ve probably heard about it already.
The book is a series of four case studies, all from employers in different sectors and types of work, but all located in and around the city of Seattle. Disputes between workers and managment at Kaiser Aluminium, Northwest Hospital, Microsoft and Boeing each show different ways in which the employment relationship is changing, and the friction that is being generated when employees’ ideals clash with changing businesses.
He uncovers one thread over and over though. The social contract between employee and employer has changed. No longer are the workers wanting just to trade loyalty for security. They now also expect to exchange commitment for respect. Respect for their opinion and professionalism, and for the quality of their work.
Concerns about the quality matter very much, and they resist attempts to reduce the professionalism or quality of what they produce or the care they give. Kusnet predicts that the quality gap, between what staff see they are capable of and what employers are willing to pay for, will be a major cause of industrial friction in coming years.
At the turn of the last century, the pioneering labor leader Samuel Gompers summed up his demands with one word: “More.” At the turn of the twenty-first century, an increasingly skilled but frustrated workforce would add one more word: “Better.”
Behavioural scientist Frederic Herzberg came up with a theory in the 70’s, which fits the situation: extrinsic factors and intrinsic ones. The extrinsic part is the security people get from work – wages, safety, conditions and so on. Inadequate provision of these causes discontent, and this traditionally has been worked out by disputes and negotiation to restore the factor that wasn’t being provided properly – it’s easy to bargain over things that can easily have a number put on them. For workers who have this at least partly sorted though, as has happened as bad work conditions have been improved in recent decades, people aspire to the intrinsic factors that make that actively happy at work, rather than just not unhappy – things like achievement, responsibility and challenging work.
In two of the disputes, these factors can be plainly seen, where the bone of contention between groups of professional staff and management would have been far less significant twenty years ago: the large numbers of temps at Microsoft, who relished the chance to work on exciting projects, but who resented the sneaky ways Microsoft used to avoid paying them directly or including them in social and professional activities regarded as normal by permanent staff; and the engineers at Boeing, who were concerned that short-termist management was robbing the company of it’s traditional vision as market leaders through engineering excellence.
A corollary of this is that, with the increases in knowledge-working and in long hours, people now put so much of themselves into their jobs, that many rely increasingly on those jobs to be the primary source of their identity – providing the fulfillment they used to get from friends, family and religion. When people are feeling they’re not respected for the work they do, it’s easy to see how disillusionment sets takes hold.
In all of these case studies, varying degrees of positive change came about only thanks to the presence of unions, and the willingness of those unions to change and to reflect the changing agenda of their members. Kusnet acknowledges that for most workers, the union is no longer an option that would even occur to them. Indeed the popular perception of a typical workers’ champion (handily documented in the medium of eponymous movies) has shifted from union organiser Norma Rae in the 1979 movie, to 2000’s campaigning trial lawyer Erin Brockovich. The Microsoft temps turned first to a class action law firm, five years before deciding to contact a union.
The book’s well worth a flick if you can find a copy – not sure how widely it’s available in the UK. Kusnet writes very accessibly, like a series of extended magazine articles, full of well-drawn personalities and interesting anecdotes as well as more academic insight. Unions will face a lot of challenges in helping workers to articulate these new agendas (presuming that is that the recession clears up any time in the next couple of years), and this book is a good starting point for us to do this.